Still Dancing: ...new adventures in non-representational painting & sculpture

David Batchelor | Lubna Chowdhary | Kevin Harman

James Hugonin  | Brandon Logan | Mirco Marchelli

It takes a certain kind of person to commit to a life of abstract picture-making and perhaps no one defines that territory more clearly that the British painter James Hugonin, from whose studio paintings have emerged over the past five decades at the rate of roughly one per year. His work is often described as living somewhere between the pointillism of Seurat and the minimalism of Agnes Martin and in this newest work - an exquisite play of light and form dancing across a gessoed surface - he simultaneously sets off in a new direction whilst recalling something of his own work of 40 years ago, as exemplified by the ‘3 studies’ on display in the hallway. 

This kind of commitment to a singular pursuit is not just the province of an older generation. 28-year-old Brandon Logan’s first exhibition was heralded in Frieze magazine earlier this year under the banner ‘New Queer Minimalism’ in a review that described his works as ‘combining sculptural and painterly elements with breath-taking finesse’. Logan describes them as paintings, though they also nod to the weaving traditions of his homeplace in Orkney, painstakingly and repeatedly flooding and fusing string with paint in a unique technique that connects the history of minimal abstraction with a sensibility born of, and belonging to, the Scottish islands. 

A hands-on approach to the materials of making is echoed in the work of several of the artists in this exhibition most notably the ceramic forms and coloured glazes of London-based Lubna Chowdhary whose work also shifts between two and three dimensions. The elements so carefully arranged on her ‘Certain Times’ shelves muster like musical notes – some huddling together and others bouncing off each other in exuberant combinations of colour and form which suggest a kind of collecting and gathering instinct as well as delight in the possibilities of colour and surface.

David Batchelor is another artist who enjoys arranging abstract elements, also often grouped on shelves, as well as made into paintings, tapestries and sculptures, in a manner that continues an ongoing investigation into colour as first defined over twenty years ago in his book ‘Chromophobia’.  The materiality of his elements is another important factor in their choosing, as is the fact that they are so often found objects – reclaimed relics of the modern city in fragments of glass, concrete or cloth.

Reclaimed relics might also be an apt description of Mirco Marchelli’s ‘object-sculpture’ which like so many of the works in this presentation operate in the space between two and three dimensions.  The material qualities of edge and modelled surface giving a sculptural presence to his painted forms. They have a conceptual connection to the Italian traditions of Arte Povera, but underpinned by a sense of muffled joy seldom found in that way of working, and a lightness and musicality that marks them as something quite distinct.

As with Logan, Chowdhary and Marchelli, the Glasgow-based artist Kevin Harman’s work sits somewhere between painting and sculpture, and like Batchelor he relies almost exclusively on found materials - working with salvaged window units and household paints that would otherwise be recycled or find their way to landfill. Despite their essentially urban origins in the detritus of Glasgow’s building trade the glass paintings that result are spectacular images that inadvertently reference the natural world and play between the poles of micro and macrocosm.